Apple tried to get such practice made illegal, and having failed in the courts, is now set to finish off the battle in the technical arena by making the next generation of its devices essentially unhackable.

Sure. All they have to do is ship a completely bug free version of iOS. Simple!

Some of these hackers simply want to muck up their iPhone or iPad and be done with it. But many or even most of them are instead on a mission, as evidenced by the propaganda term “jailbreaking” they’ve applied to their actions from the start. Their agenda is clear: they consider iPhone users who don’t hack their iPhone to be “in jail” and must be freed. As such, these “jailbreakers” have spent years twisting the arms of every iPhone user they come into contact, begging to be allowed to hack those users’ iPhones as well.

Wow. OK, the Macalope wouldn’t describe himself as a fan of jailbreaking, but he really wasn’t aware there was an epidemic of hacker gangs jailbreaking people’s iPhones at gunpoint.

The result: Apple Stores flooded with mainstream users whose iPhones are no longer reliable, usable, or comprehensible now that they’ve been altered into a fundamentally different software product than what Apple sold those users.

Holy crap! It’s too bad Apple has to support those and legitimate customers can’t just reset their phones to get them back to factory condition!

Oh, wait, that’s exactly what herp derp derp.

Seeing as how many of these geeks devote their entire lives to working around Apple and continuing to hack their iPhone and iPad as if their life and self-worth depended on it, these geeks may well figure out how to hack the iPhone 5 anyway.

What?! Isn’t the title of this piece “Lockout: iPhone 5, iPad 3 boot jailbreak hackers from platform at last”? ARRRGH.

The odd part of the ongoing jailbreaking saga is that despite the geeks’ collective effort to paint their hackery as “saving” the rest of the iPhone userbase from Apple’s “draconian” and “menacing” and “overlording” ways, the small handful of things you can do with a jailbroken phone nearly all fall under the category of inconsequential (making virtual ants crawl across your screen, replacing the AT&T logo with your own name) or illegal (stealing pay-for features like tethering without paying for them).

Actually, the vast majority of jailbreaking is probably done to enable the iPhone on other carriers. That seems a little less dastardly, though, and we don’t want to kill Beatweek’s strawman buzz.

Look, even the horny one has jailbroken an iPhone. Partly to just to try it, like that time in college when…

Uh, anyway, also because one of the little Macalopes had bricked it by trying various passcodes so many times it locked the SIM card and AT&T won’t give you the code to unlock it if it’s not the phone currently on contract.

While the Macalope still maintains that jailbreaking your iPhone just to install a security patch (one that Apple released less then two weeks later) is a fool’s errand, he thinks what happens between consenting adults and an iPhone in the privacy of their own homes is their own business. Enough with the scare tactics.

[Editors’ Note: In addition to being a mythical beast, the Macalope is not an employee of Macworld. As a result, the Macalope is always free to criticize any media organization. Even ours.]